How to: Disable Power Management and Sleep Features in Chrome OS
Chromebooks share the same power feature as any other laptop where closing the lid causes the unit goes to sleep. In some situations you may want to disable this (like if you have your Chromebook connected to an external monitor, mouse, and keyboard and don't need/want the second display).
Before you start you will need to put your Chromebook into developer mode which will reset your device back to factory defaults. If you are unsure how to boot into developer mode check Google first or leave a comment.
How to install a third-party SSL certificate for Subsonic 4.7
I have been using Subsonic for a couple years now and after getting sick of the SSL warnings you receive due to the default self-signed certificate I decided to purchase a third-party cert from a trusted CA.
The installation wasn't well documented at all (for Linux anyways), so hopefully this will help anyone that is looking to do the installation themselves. In my setup I am running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, but this should be adaptable for any Linux install with OpenSSL and ZIP installed.
How to: Set up an SMTP mail relay using Amazon Simple Email Service
Whether you need an SMTP server to relay mail for a particular application like WordPress, server monitoring software, a ticketing system, or even a copy machine Amazon has a service that is much easier to configure and use than setting up an SMTP server on a spare Windows or Linux box that you may have lying around. For a few cents a month you can use their highly reliable service to meet almost any mail relay need that you may run into.
How to: Setup and configure a Microsoft Key Management Service (KMS) Server
Microsoft offers multiple methods for activating Windows in a small to large sized business environment. While home users and businesses using retail or MAK keys activate their copies of Office and Windows directly with Microsoft (either online or by phone), businesses have the option to install the Volume Activation Management Console (VAMT) to activate from a remote system or set up a KMS host (essentially an activation server). The following guide is specifically for setting up and configuring a KMS server to allow client PCs to activate with KMS volume license keys. The major advantage of this method instead of using VAMT with MAK keys is that there is no maximum activation limit; therefore you do not need to call Microsoft when you activate 25 to 50 times to get the key re-validated. Microsoft recommends using KMS when you have at least 50 PCs in your environment and will not allow you to activate hosts until at least 25 PCs are requesting activation from your KMS server.
Windows 8 Storage Improvements
At the end of November the Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Team posted two articles about the upcoming storage changes in Windows 8. The highlights from the blog are as follows, the links below will take you to the original posts which have more information.
How To: Boot your PC from a VHD
With the release of Windows 7, Microsoft added the ability to boot off of VHD files using the new BCD boot manager. The major advantage of this is that it allows you to create the virtual disk on an existing partition and boot directly off that file rather than having to create a new partition on your physical hard disk/SSD.
OpenDNS DNSCrypt Announced
Yesterday, OpenDNS announced DNSCrypt which provides a mechanism for protecting against DNS spoofing and man-in-the-middle attacks. Check out the press release for more details. Right now it is available for Mac only, but will soon be available for Windows and likely Linux since they decided to make the product open source.
The blog post from their website can be found here.
FreeNAS 8.0.1 Storage Appliance
In a previous post, I mentioned that I was planning on re-purposing an old linux server I had laying around to a FreeNAS storage server. While I was learning more about FreeNAS I decided to hold off on the upgrades I mentioned in the above post. Since there have been a couple of major releases since then, and now that my confort level using FreeNAS for my important data has risen considerable I recently decided to splurge on some brand new hardware.
How to: Import Virtual Machines Into Amazon with the Amazon EC2 API Tools
Amazon's recent announcement regarding support for importing Windows Server 2003 VMs into EC2 (along with adding support for VHD disk images) reminded me that I have yet to give this awesome service a try. The following instructions should get you started.
Defcon/BlackHat 2011 – Scariest hacks
With Black Hat and Defcon done for the year comes the latest major security vulnerabilities. The blog post below overviews just ten of the many talks regarding cyber security.
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